Friday, November 16, 2012

Being part of a community gives life a rich dimension. Yet organisers have always struggled getting their message to their own communities of interest and recruiting from the broader public.

One innovative city Coffs Harbour, on the beautiful Australian east coast is surfing the wave, literally.

There are of course many ways of getting community messages out there, some more effective than others.
We've all seen the creative hand drawn poster at our local super market announcing a school performance or church fund raiser, sometimes they just hit the mark, other times they become covered in other pin-up sheets for window washing or amazing get rich quick schemes.
Others turn to community radio to get their message out to their public. It's a complex task to set up a radio station and expensive and time consuming to get it right.
Most popular these days is the email newsletter. OMG this is a headache, yet it has been one of the Internet's massive growth areas for 15 years... "Please stop" I hear you cry!
Now people are dabbling in video production, using YouTube etc. to distribute the good word and showing off some of their winning ways. Video is potentially very effective, as the growth in video views online has skyrocketed in line with faster networks and great archive services. Many internet users have YouTube accounts with some attempt at home video. So much so that YouTube is the world's second largest search engine, after Google itself.
Yet how to produce, find, organise and/or distribute your videos is a challenge. YouTube encourages browsing and you can find yourself totally lost, watching videos of obscure fishing lessons from Iceland or some such. Fun, yet not entirely community building.
One innovative local community took the challenge of building their community online with a good quality, well organised solution called PixelMache.tv .
The result is SwitchedonCoffs.tv an evolving community internet delivered TV station with six channels full of interesting content ready for their community to watch, produce and publish.

Check out the channels and some of the quality articles that have been produced by this innovative community. Contact them for more information or contact Organise.net.au to have them start your own IPTV channel. Training, equipment, support and system all inclusive.